What Kind Of Realtor Do I Need?

When you are selling your home, you are essentially trusting another person with the sale and management of largest investment you have. I know that there are a million ways to look at it, but let's take real estate out the equation entirely and see what happens...

If you needed surgery on an essential organ-let's say your pancreas - would you long onto the internet, find out which area doctors were the considered the finest, had the best education and facilities then try to either negotiate the price for their surgery to compete with the least expensive surgeon in the area or meet with the cheap surgeon and expect that they could somehow, for the same fee, make their facilities and quality equal to the finest ones? Didn't think so.

So this begs the question...exactly how complicated is it to sell real estate? Are the cheaper services just as good as the more expensive ones? If not, what are the factors that make a full service real estate service worth the money? Here is what you actually need to know about whether you need a full service, high end real estate agent or whether a lower end, bargain model might work for your home and preserve a portion of your equity investment.

• * What are the market conditions where you live? Is it a buyer's market or a seller's market or neither one? In a seller's market, you might be able to compromise your service level because buyers will find you. Can you ever be sure if you are getting the most money you can? No, but that is true with and without an agent. In a buyer's market, you need to do whatever you possibly can to increase your market exposure and marketability. Low service models just don't have the finances necessary to market in this way - it just doesn't compute.
  
•  What is the location of your property? Is the traffic high enough that you will have significant exposure regardless of marketing?
  
• Where are you coming up with the asking price of your property? Is it based on a bank appraisal? On the prices that you have seen on the flyers of the surrounding properties being marketed? If your price is correct or low, you may not need to worry as much about marketing and exposure.
  
•  Do you have a high comfort level with the escrow, lending and contractual processes involved in selling a home? If you are a strong researcher, you can create a comfort level here, but the nuances that come from experience will be hard to come by.
  
•  How soon do you need the home sold? If you are not in a hurry you have the liberty of all the time in the world to mess around with all the service models you want to try.